Playing Chinese Chess

THE options for using diplomacy to talk sense to North Korea are limited. China is the only nation with influence over its bellicose neighbor, so the United States and the rest of the world look to Beijing to restrain Pyongyang when the nuclear-armed nation acts up.

When China won’t go so far as closing its border with North Korea to trade, or restricting the oil shipments North Korea and its military rely on, the rest of the world blames Beijing for enabling Pyongyang to continue its incendiary threats.

But the view from Beijing is more complicated. The Chinese leadership wants something in return for putting pressure on Pyongyang, and now China has added Japan to the agenda of any discussions with the United States on North Korea. To China, the United States-China-North Korea triangle has morphed into a rectangle.

Since March, when the United Nations imposed sanctions on North Korea after its third nuclear test, the new North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un has spouted a stream of fiery rhetoric, aimed mostly at the United States and South Korea. It also ended the only cooperation project it had with South Korea — a massive factory complex near the border where South Korean companies employed more than 50,000 North Koreans.

So North Korea was on the agenda last month when Beijing hosted a parade of U.S. officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey.

This time, when the Americans pressed China to rein in its crazy neighbor, they heard a new message from Beijing’s mandarins: The United States should lean on its ally Japan to dial down tensions between Japan and China.

That China wants something in return for helping with North Korea should not come as a surprise. The United States and China typically approach disagreements — and their diplomatic resolutions — very differently. Americans have often used an almost legalistic approach and like to consider each issue on a standalone basis. Beijing, by contrast, often wants to discuss multiple issues together, all the better when it can play other countries off against one another.

“In China, that kind of issue linkage is very popular,” said Daniel A. Pinkston, the Northeast Asia deputy project director for the International Crisis Group in Seoul.

With China a fast-rising power, Washington may have to get used to Beijing’s more complex, quid-pro-quo approach to talks.

Japan is one of America’s strongest allies in the region. But China views Japan as a neighborhood troublemaker with a checkered past — particularly since December, when the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office.

A decade ago, when former President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan was seen as ratcheting up tensions with China, U.S. diplomats assured Taipei that if China attacked the island unprovoked, the United States would defend Taiwan militarily. But behind closed doors U.S. diplomats made clear that the United States would not necessarily jump to its ally’s aid if Taiwan provoked an attack by declaring independence from China. In effect, the United States sided with China over its ally.

China won’t always get its way. Neither will the United States. But good relations may mean the United States stops playing checkers and starts playing chess, Chinese style.

On Tuesday, China took a step that the United States has long had on its wish list: The state-controlled Bank of China announced that it had cut off North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank — one of Pyongyang’s few financial links to the outside world.

Also on Tuesday, two Japanese officials announced something high on China’s wish list: Prime Minister Abe would not revise previous Japanese apologies for wartime aggression and forced prostitution in China, something he had discussed in Parliament.

Whether the separate announcements were a coincidence or a horse trade, both served to calm tensions in the Asian neighborhood.

Each time the world’s reigning superpower and its fast-rising power can cooperate, another brick is laid in the foundation of U.S.-China relations, and thus the world becomes a more stable place.

Robyn Meredith is the author of “The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What it Means for All of Us.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 11, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe